Click to order #PowerUpEd

Popular Posts

Considering National Boards? I recommend the process, but you should know what you are getting into. Start early and get organized.

In the spring of 2016 I began pursuing National Board Certification for teaching. I know eventually someone will ask me for my thoughts and advice about that process, so I'll capture them now while the experience is fresh. Because I teach 9th grade, and previously taught middle school for ten years, I decided to do my NBCT in the area of Young Adolescent ELA. (Yes, I also taught 11th grade for six years, but that was a while ago.)

Though some do it in one year, I'm taking two years to complete my NBCT. Last summer, at a small local conference, I stumbled into a conversation about National Boards and happened to find out that my County Office of Education sponsored a support program. I was just in time to sign up. Through that program I got early advice and support to help me understand expectations and deadlines. The amazing staff at the County O…

The idea of turning a syllabus in to an infographic has been around for at least several years. This year my colleague made one for herself in a not-free, not-collaborative, tool, so even though we normally share all of our materials, there was no easy way for her to share her version with me. I did a bit of searching for templates, but I mostly found links to paid services. So, I challenged myself to create one from scratch in a Google Drawing.
Lots of people have asked for a template version, so here you go. It's free. Course Syllabus Infographic Template
The preview from the link above will look a lot like the image to the right. You'll notice on both that there are some arrows pointing onto the canvas. Those are the directions I added to help you recreate your own version of an infographic syllabus. You'll need to click "use template" to see the directions in the side boxes. Once your syllabus is complete you can move them off the canvas or delete them.
S…

SAMR, developed by Ruben Puentedura, is one model for examining the evolution of tech integration in classrooms. It focuses on the type of work students are doing and how much that work deviates from traditional classroom practices. In a sense, it measures the future against the past. This four minute video is great if you would like to hear him explain it in his own words.

I like the SAMR model and I think it does what models are supposed to do, it get us talking and thinking about the work going on in our classrooms. This graphic shows the progression of a teacher's thinking with a bit of humor too.

As a model though, I think SAMR has some issues we need to talk and think about more. This is my list of concerns.

For further exploration:

It privileges the modification and redefinition stages such that good teaching without tech is marginalized. Even after five years of 1:1 I still have a few fabulous lessons that just work better on paper. They are worth keeping even if they do n…

Today my students self-scored their memoirs and reflected on their writing. They used a Google Form to do this and that has provided me with some invaluable data, while providing them with a chance to answer specific questions about their progress (or lack of progress) and learning. For those of you who like research, check out what John Hattie has to say about the impact of students grading their own work. In 2009 he found the impact factor of that to be 1.44. He revised it in 2015 to 1.33, but that's still a huge impact from a simple activity that all students can engage with.

The form I made for my students self-evaluation branched, that is to say there was a question on the first page that asked if their memoir was complete, almost complete, or would be complete by Friday. Based on their answers to this first question students answered different sets of questions on their next page. If a student said his/her memoir was complete the form had questions like, "What do you l…

My students each share a Google Doc with me in September and they use that doc all year long. We call it their English Journal and it holds all of the small daily work we do. This is one of the secrets of my 1:1 classroom and it is such an ordinary part of our workflow that I have rarely thought to write about it. Let’s fix that.

The challenge for any educator is knowing what kinds of work and thinking students are actually doing in our classes. The traditional way of gaining this insight was to collect papers: homework, notes, reflections, quick writes, exit slips, graphic organizers, etc. It all happened on paper and we collected it to look at, or at least to make students think we looked at it.

The challenge for teachers switching to digital classrooms and is that we still want all of that information and it is natural to assume at first that we just need to collect those things digitally. The result though, is a separate document for every daily bit of work students do. If you tho…